The Federal Budget

November 29, 2018 ·
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by BRIAN LOCKHART

Feeling the economic pinch of rising prices?

Well, dig deeper, and deeper – and your children and grandchildren just got screwed to the wall. Again!

How does this current government stand in front of television cameras and in Parliament and tell the Canadian people that their new programs are ‘now promises kept’ while conveniently forgetting they just screwed us again.

You wouldn’t stand for this in your private life, so why do we allow successive governments to lie directly to us without being held accountable.

Say you decide to put an addition on your home.

After carefully weighing your options and budget, you find the right plan to build that addition.

You contact several local contractors to see who can do the job. Three apply – all telling you how great they are and how they can best build the new addition.

You finally decide on one contractor who comes over and evaluates your plan.

He then presents you with an estimate of the cost of materials, labour, and whatever else goes into completing the job.

It’s going to cost you $20,000. For the sake of argument, let’s say you have saved up $10,000 and plan on getting the other $10,000 through your line of credit.

You’re all set.

Three months later that addition is complete and the contractor hands you an invoice for $60,000.

Wait a minute, that’s more than three times the estimate.

“You can’t do that!” you tell the contractor. “Here’s the estimate you gave me for the work. I can’t afford to pay your invoice!”

“That’s just an estimate,” the contractor replies. “In the contracting business we can charge what ever we want for the final job – and there’s nothing you can do about it. So pay up.”

That’s exactly what happened to all of us.

The Liberal government said, during the course of the election campaign, they would run deficits that would not exceed $10 billion. For the current fiscal year, they said the plan would be not exceed $5.7 billion.

So here’s the part where the contractor screws the homeowner.

The government just announced they are running to the to tune of $18 billion in the red this year. That’s more than three times what was promised.

In other words, those politicians you elected on their campaign promises lied – again.

They can do all the spin, all the usual double talk, all the usual deflecting, all the usual political banter showing how much good the new programs will do, but in the end the still lied – to you, the taxpayer. Throw all these numbers on the current national debt and you come up with a figure of around $688 billion.

Debt means you owe. You have to pay it back.

The problem is we can’t pay it back, and we won’t ever be able to pay it back. As of now this country is paying $34 billion annually just to service this debt.

That’s $34 billion that could have been used to build hospitals and fix a lot of infrastructure. That’s $34 billion that could have been used to pay for medical services, get homeless people off the streets, and do a lot of other good for the citizens of this country. Instead, that’s $34 billion going into some rich guy’s pockets while veterans can’t afford a place to live and diabetics have to pay for life-saving insulin.

People seem to not be aware of exactly how much a billion dollars is. It’s a figure that gets thrown around a lot these days, but it is a massive amount of money.

The way things are going, we’re heading for a catastrophic economic collapse. Who knows when, but some day, someone might just call in a loan that will start a ripple effect that will plunge the economy into ruins.

Since politicians are in office for their term, we can’t fire them and all we can do is wait for another election.

Maybe it’s time this was changed.

If any other person involved with a private company gained employment by lying then cost the company money by deceit, they would be out the door real fast with no apology.

Unfortunately in the world of politics, even when you point out to a politician ‘you lied’ and didn’t follow through on promises that got you elected, you’ll never get a straight answer. Instead you’ll get a bunch of malarkey about how great the new programs are – that we paid for.